LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

THE OLD AND THE NEW THEORY OF INSPIRATION. [To THE EDITOR 07 TIER " EPICTATOR."

SIR,—The meeting of the Church Congress in Manchester has been remarkable for the boldness with which burning questions have been faced. May I iterate, at somewhat greater length, in your columns the views which lack of time enabled me to refer to only casually in a discussion • on Tuesday (September 25th) which it was conceded had much more than an ephemeral interest P It cannot be gainsaid that the Church has made great progress in recent years. Its administrative machinery has been greatly strengthened and reformed, and its popularity greatly extended. In the fields of exegesis and of anti- quarian and linguistic criticism, it has maintained its repu- tation as the most learned of Christian bodies ; while at no time has its clergy presented a higher standard of devotion and self-sacrifice. This is true, and yet the fact remains, whether we choose to face it or not that the attitude of men of science and men of letters towards its dogmatic teaching has not grown more but less sympathetic, and probably never in our history have these classes been more apathetic and cold and Gallio-like than at present.

This is reflected in the universal complaint that the number of grown men who attend church (or chapel either) has been steadily decreasing, while those who go regularly in many instances obey convention or habit rather than any more serious impulse. What I state is so generally conceded whenever the question arises for discussion, that I presume it is beyond question. If so, it is assuredly a matter of supreme importance which cannot much longer escape serious notice. It is no use discussing methods of attracting the artisans to church, or of making the Church more popular with the poor, if meanwhile we evade the more difficult and obstinate ques- tion of how to reconcile the Church to those who are the best educated and the pioneers of science and literature. It matters not much if women and children and emotional people continue to attend church, if the great mass of grown men stay away.

This is said in many quarters, not only among professed men of science and letters, but among those who have the responsibility of teaching the Church's lessons, and whose freedom of public criticism is naturally trammelled. My purpose in writing is not to make this general statement, which is too trite to occupy your space, but to draw attention to what I believe to be the most important and the most-easily remedied of the causes of this state of things,—a cause to which small reference has been made hitherto, and which has, therefore, perhaps some elements of freshness.

If we try and gauge the views of most of the men we meet, we shall find that there is no lack of loyalty to the morality which is taught from the pulpit, nor (now that the uncom- promising Calvinism which prevailed in some quarters is extinct) is there any real quarrel with the great dogmas of Christianity and their lessons ; but there is a very general revolt against the iteration of views which criticism and science have made quite untenable. There is a very deep-founded distrust of certain documents which are in too many cases accepted as inspired in every word and every phrase, and with which the facts of astronomy, of geology, and biology are absolutely inconsistent. The cosmogony of Genesis is still taught in hundreds of churches as if it had a much higher sanction than other primitive efforts of the human mind to discover the origin of things, and as if its complete and literal acceptance were absolutely necessary to constitute a good Christian. The Books of Kings and Chronicles, of Ezra and Nehemiah, which are the counterparts of similar books pre- served at Babylon and Nineveh, and are the records of Jewish

scribes honestly recording the story of their race, are, in spite of internal contradictions, treated as the actual handiwork of the Divine author of the universe. The Song of Solomon, a secular erotic poem, the Book of Proverbs, a collection of wise sayings, in both cases matched in form and authority in more than one Eastern literature, are referred to as unerring guides to our conscience and our faith.

This teaching, which is in the teeth of every kind of con- verging evidence, is persisted in. Meanwhile, is it strange that men of integrity and of a strong sense of duty revolt against having to give the homage of their attention to what

they disbelieve in their hearts? Hence, in .my -view, a great deal of the listless and callous indifference which we meet with. How, then, is this to be met? In some cases, it is met by denouncing science and literature as essentially at issue- with divine truth, and their cultivation as inconsistent with a healthy conscience, and this, too, by men who continually appeal to the Reformation, because it introduced the right of private judgment into these questions. In other cases, a form of casuistical reasoning is used to reconcile the plain state- ments in the Bible with the plain facts of science, which would be denounced as immoral in a manual of morality by some Dominican doctor. Both these methods have been tried and found wanting. They, in fact, only invite contempt. It seems to me, Sir, there is a better, a simpler, and an older answer.

How is it that the most dogmatic of Churches, the Roman Catholic, seems to allow to its members the widest and freest latitude in the discussion of these questions, and that perhaps the boldest writing upon these issues which comes from pro- fessed theologians, comes from men of that school? Does not this point to some way out of our difficulty which ought not to startle good people, however dogmatic they may be ? The lesson it seen:us to point, and it is one which I would press home, is the necessity for a reconsideration of the theory of inspiration which we owe to the Reformation. The great fact of the.Reformation, when viewed as a religious and not as a political revolution, was the introduction of an entirely new rule of faith. Before the Reformation, "the Church" was the depository and interpreter of truth. After the Reformation it was the Bible, and not the Church, which occupied this position,—the Bible not in its original tongue, but after passing through the tremendous ordeal of translation into the vernacular ; the Bible not as interpreted by scholars and trained theologians, but as interpreted by any simple man who can read.

The change was stupendous in its effects, as every historian of religious thought has shown. One effect—and that per- haps the most important—has been very largely overlooked, however,—namely, that with the new criterion of truth a new theory of inspiration was introduced ; a theory of inspiration to which I would attribute the greater portion of the difficulties which occupied the earlier portion of this letter.

The new theory of inspiration treated the whole Bible as of.. precisely the same authority, as all of divine origin, and all to: be appealed to with the same confidence, notwithstanding numerous and recognised and serious errors of translation and variations in the manuscripts. Every chapter, every phrase, was thus stamped with an authority not to be questioned. The tremendous issues which face all thoughtful people were made dependent upon the maintenance at all hazards of every tittle of the Bible, and the moral standards of the world were shaped in accordance with examples and instances recorded by Jewish scribes, and so difficult to reconcile with man's trained sense of right and justice, that every child's conscience needed a metaphysical buttress for its support.

This theory of inspiration may or may not be right. What I contend for is, that it is very largely responsible for our difficulties, and that it is a new and not an old theory. Before the Reformation, the truth or falsity of a dogmatic statement was made dependent upon what the Church had definitely laid down ; and the notion of verbal inspiration of the Bible would, I take it, have been scouted by any theologian who knew how the text of the Vulgate was composed by Jerome, and what a long and tedious process it was by which the Canon of the New Testament was finally settled.

This is not all. The Bible is a library of books, and not a book merely ; or rather it is two libraries,—one of them the product and rule of faith of Judaism, and the other the corresponding product and rule of faith of Christianity. The latter library was selected and had its Canon fixed by a series of Councils, and after a long and diligent examination of the question by the best, the most learned, and most responsible teachers of Christianity. Its books were selected as contain- ing Christian dogmas and Christian teaching, and entirely on the ground that they contained (one and all) portions of inspired truth. The other library, which was collected very largely by the great Synagogue after the Captivity, was based on another process of selection altogether. It was made to comprise not merely professedly religious books to be used in the public services—such as the "Book of the Law" and the works of the Prophets, of th. Psalmists, &c.—but all the historical and documentary evidences of the history of the. chosen race which had escaped the tooth of time,—their chronicles, their romances, their secular poetry ; all their diplontata, in fact. To them and to us, documents of the highest value, as enabling us to trace the pedigree and romantic history of a most interesting race, but having the authority of secular literature only. This was apparently the. view of the Jews themselves. It was apparently, also, the view of the mediaeval Church, which puts the Books of the Maccabees, of Tobit, Ac., into its Canon, and treated them as of equal value with the books of which they are a continuation,. —namely, those of Ezra and Nehemiah.

Is it not laying a most unnecessary burden upon Christian men to insist not only that they must believe what the • Christian Church deemed alone necessary for fifteen centuries, but what was never insisted upon by the Jews themselves,. and thus to tie down and hamper the moral teaching of the clergy and the conscience of their audience, to statements whose divine authority and inspiration were a discovery of the sixteenth century, and the result not of new evidence, but of the necessity of finding a new basis for a new criterion a truth outside the tradition of the Church ?

If this view be just, it seems to me that by reverting to old methods of viewing inspiration, such as the Jews and the Greek Churches still favour, and which the Latin Church also favoured before the Tridentine decrees, we shall escape from what is a real and growing difficulty. It may not be easy for- those to do this who view either Trent or Geneva as the ultimate. sources of religious light; but it ought not to be difficult for- others who, while thankful for the great cleansing out which took place in the sixteenth century, have never permitted the theory to prevail that there was nothing to learn from the pre- Reformation Church, or that the continuity of its best wisdom was ever broken. To this large and growing section of the Christian Church, it would be a great relief if our teachers ceased to make the bright and everlasting wisdom which is en- shrined in the Bible, dependent upon the maintenance of every statement which honest but fallible and secular writers wrote' down many centuries before Christ. This mode of approaching the problem may not be altogether unfruitful, nor altogether remote from the thoughts of some at least of your readers who may have been startled by th3 discussion which occupied us at Manchester last Tuesday week.—I am, Sir, &c.,

Bentcliffe, Bodes, October 9th. HENRY H. HOWORTR.

[Surely oui correspondent is quite mistaken in attributing to St. Jerome the manifold errors of the Vulgate. We have. always understood that though some of St. Jerome's versiona have been adopted in the Vulgate, that minium gatherunt of various texts is far inferior to any Latin text that can justly be attributed to St. Jerome.—ED. Spectator.]